Wired reports:

A professor at Rutgers University who wrote a book about “antifa” almost a decade ago is trying—and struggling—to flee the US for Europe after a weeks-long online campaign against him by far-right influencers was followed by death threats.

Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers who specializes in Spanish history and radicalism, has been a far-right target ever since he published Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook in 2017. But after president Donald Trump issued an executive order seeking to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” social media posts from far-right figures and a petition promoted by conservative student activists demonized Bray as an “antifa member” who was “supporting terrorist behavior.” Dozens of targeted threats followed.

The threats, emailed from anonymous accounts and reviewed by WIRED, included a message that read: “I’ll kill you in front of your students.” Another message, with the subject line “your violent rhetoric is under investigation,” listed Bray’s home address where he lives with his wife and two young children.

“We made the decision on Saturday [to leave the US] when our home address became known by people who want to do us harm,” says Bray. The professor informed his students on Sunday that he would be moving to Europe as a result of the threats.

But at the airport, after they had already scanned their passports, received boarding passes, checked in their bags, and cleared security, Bray says he and his family were not allowed to board their flight. Upon arrival at their boarding gate, their reservations had suddenly disappeared from the United Airlines system.

“For 20 minutes [United Airlines] couldn’t even figure out what had happened,” says Bray. “Then they said that, basically, somehow someone had canceled our reservation, presumably in between checking through and then. I don’t know what happened. There are various potential explanations, but I don’t think it was a coincidence that it happened to us on that day.”

Bray says that he has been rebooked on flights to Spain. “We’re going to try it one more time,” says Bray. “If it doesn’t work, then we’ll do something else.” [Continue reading…]

Rutgers AAUP-AFT and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union issued this statement:

This week, our colleague Dr. Mark Bray has come under attack by Turning Point USA’s Rutgers chapter for his public scholarship. Their campaign to have Dr. Bray fired has resulted in doxxing and death threats that extended to his partner, Dr. Yesenia Barragan, also our colleague, forcing Drs. Barragan and Bray to leave their home for their safety and that of their children. Rutgers AAUP-AFT and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union condemn this campaign and stand in solidarity with our valued colleagues.

Dr. Bray, an assistant teaching professor in the History Department at Rutgers-New Brunswick, was targeted because of his extensive work as a historian of anti-fascist movements, including his widely read Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (2017). Dr. Barragan, an associate professor in the History Department, is an award-winning scholar of slavery in the Americas whose work includes Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (2021).

Turning Point’s attack is part of an escalating effort by the far right to suppress the speech, teaching, and scholarship of faculty who do not conform to their movement’s politics. Turning Point is part of a larger network of groups and elected officials who have targeted faculty at Rutgers and around the country. The bad-faith effort to frame Dr. Bray as a threat to students and to get him fired is an affront to Rutgers’ values of academic freedom, as well as to Turning Point’s self-proclaimed commitment to a culture of open debate. [Continue reading…]